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Wednesday, 21 November 2012

On This Day in Typewriter History: Single Type Elements Galore

PART 181

Single type element typewriters were all the rage on this day
(November 20) in 1888. The only three typewriter patents issued on that day all
related to such machines.

Franz X.Wagner

One was the work of a man who would later make the typewheel and
typeshuttle virtually obsolete: Franz Xaver Wagner, who in 1893 mastered fully
visible typing. The single element survived, of course, most notably in the
Hammond and its successor, the Vari-Typer, as well as the Blickensderfer. But
the advent of the Wagner-Underwoodfrontstrike mechanism made the use of single
type elements to achieve the goal of visible typing much less of an imperative.
Remington eventually followed Underwood’s lead and these two brands came to
dominate the market.

For a whole range of reasons – among them visible writing, making much more
compact machines without typebars, easy adaptability for different fonts and
languages and avoiding patent infringements – single type element typewriters
appealed greatly to typewriter inventors in the 1880s and 90s.

But with the demise of the Blick, and Hammond’s struggle to
compete, the single type element almost became antiquated. Hence all the fuss, and
the false claims of a “revolution”, when in 1961 IBM reinvented the (type)
wheel and reintroduced a single element: the golfball.

Interestingly enough, when Horace Smart “Bud” Beattie
(1909-1993) applied for a patent in 1948 for the “high speed printing
mechanism” which would grow into the golfball, in the first instance he
referenced another single type element patent, one issued on this day in 1888 (so
much for the “revolution”).

A 'flying walnut'?

If I use the analogy that an 1888 design was like a walnut
squirrelled away, to lay dormant for 60 years, I do so for a reason: IBM’s first
name for the golfball was the rather more appealing “flying walnut”.

'Bud' Beattie

But Beattie, John E.Hickerson and the IBM team developing the
golfball at Kenyon House in Poughkeepsie in the early 1950s also referred to
the typehead as the “mushroom printer”, with good reason. It looked exactly like a mushroom when it was
first designed in 1888, and was identical when Beattie brought it back to life in
1948. Even IBM later acknowledged it was an “umbrella-shaped development model
…”

Beattie's 1948 'mushroom printer'

Perry's 1888 'mushroom' device

The inventor of this convex “mushroom” or “umbrella” single type
element was Charles Hire Perry, who was born in Woodstock, Vermont, on June 25,
1844. This entry on Dr Perry in a book about the Democrats of New York State
tells much of his remarkable if little known life story:

Perry attended the Green Mountain Liberal Institute (nowadays
the Green Mountain Perkins Academy) in Woodstock. He graduated from Dartmouth
Medical School in Hanover in 1867, the year he began practising.

Apparently his preferred medicine was allopath: Allopathic
medicine is now an expression commonly used by homeopaths and proponents of other
forms of alternative medicine to refer to mainstream medical use of
pharmacologically active agents or physical interventions to treat or suppress
symptoms or pathophysiologic processes of diseases or conditions.

Perry's 1888 typewriter, above and below

Perry took out two typewriter patents, in 1888 and 1890, as well
as one in 1889 for the manufacture of type plates. The second typewriter
patent, an extension of the first, showed a machine that was almost like a
writing ball.

Perry's 1890 improved typewriter

This, and the type plates patent, were assigned to Thomas
Redfield Proctor (1844-1920), a wealthy Utica, New York, hotelier, banker and businessman
who backed some of Perry’s enterprises. Born in Proctorsville, Vermont, Proctor
was one of the New York commissioners for the World's Fair at Paris in 1900. He
has been described as “perhaps Utica’s greater benefactor”.

Thomas R.Proctor

Given Perry and his father, Thomas Jefferson Perry, were staunch Democrats, it is interesting that his backer was a noted Republican (Proctor was
a delegate to the Republican Party’s national conventions of 1908, 1916 and
1920). Obviously political ideology didn’t enter into it when typewriters were
on the agenda.

Proctor gave the land for the Utica Public Library and gave the
library a collection of letters written by all of the Presidents of the United
States and a bronze tablet containing Lincoln's Gettysburg address.

Perry died in Oneida on December 16, 1921, aged 77.

One of the small delights of this sort of research work is getting in
touch with somebody who seems to care. I was able to contact the president of
the board of trustees of Perry’s first school, Green Mountain, who was excited
to hear about the deeds of one of the school's earliest pupils.

The second single type elementtypewriter patent we are looking at today
was issued to James William Chrysty, of Pataskala, Ohio. Chrysty was born in
Liberty, quite close to where Richard Polt now lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November
29, 1851. After working on his father’s farm, Chrysty became a school teacher
in Hamilton, Ohio. He died in Houston, Texas, where his son was a builder, on
February 7, 1898, aged just 46. Not surprisingly, his surname was often
misspelt Christie or Christy.

Chrysty’s index machine looks to have elements of the earlier Hall
(character pad and indicator-plunger) but uses a typesleeve and looks quite
compact. I think it would have been a very nice little typewriter, if it had
ever been made.

Finally, back to Wagner, whose 1888 design also appears to be compact, and to incorporate a typeshuttle or large typewheel.

Wagner seemed quite determined at this stage of his career to build
a single type element machine, and is here returning to an earlier idea,
expanding on it.

This was Wagner’s fifth typewriter patent. He had earlier worked
for George Washington Newton Yōst and the Type-Writer Company, employing a (in this
case unacceptable) typeshuttle for the Caligraph, and hung on to the single type element idea for
an 1883 patent assigned to a group of gentleman called William F.Miller, Louis
C.Fuller and Edward P.Hamilton. It was for a machine that looked like the Hamilton Automatic of a much later period, except of course the Hamilton is an understroke typebar machine.

But by the time Wagner designed the National for Henry Harmon
Unz and Stephen Terhune Smith Sr, in 1885, it seemed he had been won over to
typebars, leaving the next stage of the single type element, keyboard
typewriter advance to George Canfield Blickensderfer. Wagner continued along the
typebar path while working for Amos and Emmett Densmore, yet this 1888 evidence suggests he was
still loathe to put aside a single type element typewriter.

2 comments:

Thank you Richard, very kind. The story goes that Beattie got the idea which led to the golfball from screwing in a light bulb (which obviously lit up in his thought balloon). If it is true, he must have quickly found in patent searches that someone had already been there, done that, 60 years earlier.

Kia Ora!

Tapping gingerly. Sunday morning, coming down.
Might be my third or fourth attempt to establish a blog. Steeled to make it work this time. All about typewriters. Typewriters in Australia. Ergo, "oz.Typewriter", something a bit different. Please enjoy.